EFFector Vol. 11, No. 9 June 15, 1998 editor@eff.org
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424
See http://www.eff.org for more information on EFF activities & alerts!
Please distribute widely to appropriate forums
June 15, 1998
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is re-launching its Blue Ribbon Campaign for Online Freedom of Expression today (June 15, 1998) in opposition to renewed Congressional attempts to impose censorship controls on the Internet in the U.S. The original campaign, launched in conjunction with the related "Turn the Web Black" anti-censorship protest in 1995, raised awareness of and opposition to the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which was eventually ruled unconstitutional by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision one year ago this month.
All Web users are strongly encouraged to place a Blue Ribbon Campaign icon on their servers and Web pages.
Beginning with the original Blue Ribbon Campaign against the CDA, hundreds of thousands of World Wide Web sites all over the world have chosen to display the Blue Ribbon on their pages and link to EFF Web pages containing information about censorship legislation and free speech on the Internet. The Blue Ribbon page became the fourth most-linked-to site on the Internet and has been accessed millions of times - peaking at over a million hits per day when President Clinton signed the ill-fated CDA into law. There are at least 170,000 sites that carry the Blue Ribbon today.
The new Blue Ribbon Campaign will link directly to a Congressional action site to encourage Internet users to contact their legislators to defend their free speech rights on the Internet. This site is currently sponsored by EFF in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provides users the ability to send their legislators a FAX or e-mail opposing the two bills.
All Web users are strongly encouraged to place a Blue Ribbon Campaign icon (below) on their servers and Web pages. Just copy and paste this text into your HTML Web page where you want the Blue Ribbon icon to appear:
<BR><DIV ALIGN="CENTER"><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html"><IMG SRC="http://br.eff.org/br.gif" ALT="[Blue Ribbon Campaign icon]" HEIGHT="76" WIDTH="112" BORDER="0" ALIGN="MIDDLE"><BR> Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!</A></DIV><BR>
And it will look like this:
NOTE: If your site has traffic topping 30,000 hits a day, we request that you copy the Blue Ribbon icon to your server and link to it locally. The EFF server will not be able to handle that amount of extra traffic from multiple sites. The typical participant will want to link to our copy, which automatically changes to an "ALERT!" version during times of danger to online free speech.
Non-U.S. Activists: You may wish to seek out others in your area to form a (formal or informal) group to track censorship legislation, Internet regulation, and Net-related free speech legal cases in your jurisdiction. We will be happy to link to new Blue Ribbon pages in other parts of the world. We are also aware that in some areas the blue ribbon symbol may stand for other causes already; in such places, an alternate symbol will be needed (perhaps a blue torch?).
Though the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was unanimously struck down by a strongly pro-freedom US Supreme Court decision (Reno v. ACLU) in 1997, US Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) has advanced a new unnamed "Son of CDA" Internet censorship bill, S. 1492. The bill would constitute a ban on web posting of material deemed "harmful to minors." This censorship bill would make it a crime to have the content of the average bookstore or library available from a web site!
Additionally, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is pushing another "sequel" to the CDA. His "Internet School Filtering Act," S. 1619, would force federally funded libraries (and schools) to use software filters to censor adult and child access on their Internet connections in the name of "protecting children from pornography." Such filtering software does not actually perform as advertised. Not only is such software physically incapable of blocking material that fits a particular legal definition such as "obscene," but it has also been demonstrated to block numerous sites with no "obscene" or "indecent" content whatsoever, including a wealth of material that is perfectly suitable for children.
Action on both bills appeared to be waning, since both were considered "too controversial" to make it onto the Senate's "Tech Week" fast track bill consideration and passage schedule in mid-May. This means our activism is paying off. However, both bills are expected to arise for legislative debate and vote before Congress in the next three weeks, so this is no time for complacency. All Senators need to receive even more constituent letters and faxes opposing these bills, or they might well pass at the last minute.
More information on the bills is available on the EFF Web site. See http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills/1998_bills/
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties organizations devoted to ensuring that the Internet remains the world's first truly global vehicle for free speech, and that the privacy and security of all on-line communication is preserved. Founded in 1990 as a nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San Francisco, California. EFF maintains an extensive archive of information on encryption policy, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org .
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